The prize committee is pleased to announce that Maria Tanyag’s article, ‘Who cares for the carers? Patriarchal contradictions and the reinvention of the global economy’, published in Review of International Political Economy, has won the 2026 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.
The committee recognises Maria Tanyag’s article for its meticulous and thought-provoking analysis of the crisis-driven, patriarchal reinvention of the global economy. It confronts a stark pandemic paradox: at a time when our collective need for care was most profound, care workers experienced severe depletion and mortality. Building on feminist political economy scholarship on the intensification of social reproductive crises, Tanyag illuminates how capitalism’s contradictions can be made generative for sustaining capital accumulation and the preservation of political power. Her deft engagement with ‘boundary struggles’ reveals the state’s reconfiguration of economic, cultural and security boundaries to compel the elasticity of social reproduction through authoritarian crisis management.
The committee also commends Tanyag for bringing together survey responses and first-hand interviews with care workers in the Philippines. This careful engagement of empirical material grounds the article’s compelling account of the pandemic’s effect on care workers along lines of gender, class and employment status.
The article makes a significant contribution to feminist political economy by showing how social reproductive crises in the Global South are structurally rooted in crisis mitigation in the Global North, and how care workers’ everyday struggles are connected to the global economy’s capacity to recalibrate and survive. More broadly, it sheds light on neoliberalism, crisis politics, and labour markets, and will interest a wide range of IPE scholars.
It is for these reasons, the committee concludes that Tanyag’s article deserves recognition, and we invite the broader AIPEN community to engage with the intellectual contributions of this work. Congratulations to Maria!
The prize will be presented at the AIPEN workshop in Melbourne in 2027, and the author will be invited to write a blog post about the winning article for Progress in Political Economy.
The prize committee would also like to congratulate the authors of the three other shortlisted articles. The committee was impressed by their work, which addresses important and timely questions across IPE. Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones provide an illuminating analysis of the ‘miserly convergence’ of Western and Chinese development financing, highlighting the implications of geopolitical competition for development in the Global South. Anna Sturman brings critical agrarian studies into broader debates on capitalism and socio-ecological transformation in an era of climate change. Trissia Wijaya offers a nuanced account of the rise of authoritarian statism in Indonesia, advancing our understanding of the relationship between capitalist crisis, growth strategies and class relations.
This year’s selection committee comprised Ainsley Elbra, Anja Bless, Elliot Dolan-Evans, Tim DiMuzio, and Wenting He.
Past Awardees
2025 Anja Bless, ‘The co-optation of regenerative agriculture: revisiting the corporate environmental food regime’, Globalizations, 22(4) (2025).
2024 Elliot Dolan-Evans, ‘Pipes, profits and peace: toward a feminist political economy of gas during war’, Review of International Political Economy, 30(2) (2023).
2023 Ainsley Elbra, John Mikler and Hannah Murphy-Gregory, ‘The Big Four and corporate tax governance: From global dis-harmony to national regulatory incrementalism’, Global Policy, 14(1) (2023).
2022 Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, ‘COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state’, Review of International Political Economy, 29(4) (2022).
2021 Melissa Johnston, ‘Frontier finance: the role of microfinance in debt and violence in post-conflict Timor-Leste’, Review of International Political Economy, 27(6) (2020).
2020 Claire Parfitt, ‘ESG integration treats ethics as risk, but whose ethics and whose risk? Responsible investment in the context of precarity and risk-shifting’, Critical Sociology, 46(4-5) (2020).
2019 Linda Weiss and Elizabeth Thurbon, ‘Power paradox: how the extension of US infrastructural power abroad diminishes state capacity at home’, Review of International Political Economy 25(6) (2018).
2018 Maria Tanyag, ‘Invisible labor, invisible bodies: how the global political economy affects reproductive freedom in the Philippines’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19(1) (2017).
2017 Samanthi J. Gunawardana, ‘“To finish, we must finish”: everyday practices of depletion in Sri Lankan export-processing zones’, Globalizations, 13(6) (2016).
2016 Gareth Bryant, Siddhartha Dabhi and Steffen Böhm, ‘“Fixing” the climate crisis: capital, states, and carbon offsetting in India’, Environment and Planning A, 47(10) (2015).
2015 Ainsley Elbra, ‘Interests need not be pursued if they can be created: private governance in African gold mining’, Business and Politics, 16(2) (2014).
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